Because the rest of the world doesn't like free speech? Americans may throw the term around more often, but I wouldn't equate holding it important to nationalism. If anything, American nationalism has forced free speech on America, not the other way around (and yes, I'm aware of the many failures. Not saying it's perfect).
In America there is not any particular issue that is so contentious that free speech is actually curtailed. But there is tremendous social pressure for people to voluntarily curtail certain forms of speech.
If the US had a less stable society, chances are certain kinds of speech would be considered more dangerous, and we'd progress from certain forms being considered socially inappropriate to being banned outright.
This has happened in our past... and the usual framing of it is that we've progressed past such mistakes. In reality the pressures that force such things have abated.
I'd be interested to see what happened with free speech during the civil war days... I really don't know, no class has covered it and k-12 grade school has made me sick of US-history (flat-out fabrications and ridiculous exaggerations in tons of cases, and super super super dry info with few connections for the remaining). It'd be a good measuring point for this, though, as that's about as unstable as you can get. Yeah, slave-free-speech was blocked, but that's arguably mostly because they weren't really viewed as people, thus didn't have that right in the first place.
"I'd be interested to see what happened with free speech during the civil war days."
Lincoln greatly expanded the power of the Presidency in the name of War time expediency, but there were people within the Union who fiercely criticized Lincoln and his government and its policies till the very end of the war. Very different from the situation in China. (Just try criticizing the Party 60+ years after the Revolution!).
Besides, any flirtations with restrciting Freedom Of Speech lasted hardly 4 years, not half a century as in China. But then the USA had a very strong tradition of Freedom OF Speech wheras such a concept was alien to China. That said, Hong Kong seems to be relatively politically vibrant, in spite of being ruled by the MAinland. I suspect once people get used to thinking for themselves and having the freedom to express their thoughts for a generation or two, it is hard to eradicate completely.
"the full question of whether the Constitution gave the president a special power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during wartime never got to the Court. In large part that's because the administration made sure it didn't. It had a valid fear that the Court would rule against there being such a power under the Constitution, and such a ruling would undermine the war effort. On the other hand, by keeping the matter away from the Court, the administration could largely accomplish its policy.
Opposition, especially in the press, clamored for a test case to settle whether the arbitrary arrests were legal. Secretary of War Stanton thought it would be wise to do so, too, but Attorney General Bates talked him out of it. In a letter of Jan. 31, 1863, Bates wrote to Stanton that a Supreme Court decision against the habeas corpus policy "would inflict upon the Administration a serious injury," and would do more good to the rebels "than the worst defeat our armies have yet sustained."
Bates said he would support a test case if he thought it had a chance of success. "I confess to you frankly, that, knowing as we do, the antecedents and present proclivities of the majority of that Court (and I speak of them with entire respect) I can anticipate no such results." This was after Lincoln had appointed three justices to the bench. Bates had intimate contact with the justices, and his judgment of their likely verdicts was well informed.
"Many loyal men deny this power to the President," he wrote to the Secretary of War, "and, however confident we may be that he possesses it, it is no imputation on the loyalty of the majority of the Court to presume that on this point they agree with their political school."
George W. Bush suspended Habeas Corpus simply by putting detainees on a plane and "renditioning" them to a jurisdiction where the constitution didn't apply.
Do you think it's a coincidence that they decided to build a prison at Gitmo (conveniently close to the US but outside of US constitutional jurisdiction).
Detainees were taken renditioned to yet another jurisdiction when their captors wished to do things to them that were forbidden by laws that do apply to Gitmo.
Lincoln certainly did unconstitutionally suspend habeas corpus. But the tens of thousands of Northern citizens who were imprisoned without due process by the Lincoln administration (as many as 38,000 by one estimate in the Columbia Law Journal) were overwhelmingly plain citizens from all walks of life who simply expressed doubt over the administration’s unconstitutional and despotic policies, including the shutting down of more than 300 opposition newspapers and the mass arrest of political dissenters by the military. Tens of thousands of Northern political prisoners spent months in a series of gulags, such as Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor, which came to be known as "the American Bastille."
I think you ask an interesting question... But it's important to consider that during the civil war the US was still largely pre-industrial and there was very little Federal power.
I think a good example of the general trend I mention is from WW2 when the US decided to set up internment camps for peaceful Americans of Japanese descent.
We did the same thing immediately after 9/11 but this time the victims were mostly immigrants who were minor immigration law violators.... but the spirit was the same.
In both cases our values go out the window the minute there is the smallest amount of pressure.
Many of the criticisms of China that I've read seem to entail that Chinese citizens are dully unaware of the benefits of free speech, or that they are hapless victims of their government. Neither is a particularly flattering picture of the Chinese as human beings... and I'd argue such criticisms amount to dehumanization and early beating of the war drums -- we never go to war against people who are our moral equals after all, and thus we must first dehumanize our enemy by reducing him to the status of a morally deficient, diminished pawn of an evil state.
In both cases our values go out the window the minute there is the smallest amount of pressure.
I've always had a problem with this line of reasoning. While I understand that flexibility is given to the executive during times of war, I haven't seen total tyranny by any means. The founders understood that one of the roles of the executive was to take temporary extraordinary powers in time of war. That's one of the reasons for the office. This internment camp example seems especially flawed.
I want to see if I understand it.
During wartime, the national government has the ability (and uses it) to forcefully conscript people and send them off to fight and die. In addition, warring powers have the ability to (and do) use explosives, fire, and all sorts of other means to kill civilians. Furthermore, the government has the ability (and the obligation) to move parts of the population around depending on national need.
Given this, you think going to live in an internment camp seems like tossing our values out the window? Like to tell that to some poor grunt storming the beach at Iwo Jima? The next war where the world loses 60 million people or more, can I go live in a camp without harm for a few years? Hell I won't even complain about it.
EDIT: I'd like to add that I consider Lincoln to be an American tyrant. Having said that, there is simply no comparison with the Chinese examples in this thread.
Since we have had relatively few wars, war powers provisions are among the most naive and ill-tested of any part of the constitution. In fact the need for the recent supreme court cases on Habeas Corpus (one of the oldest concepts in our common law) shows just how untested they are... and even when there is fairly clear legal doctrine, technologies such as rendition to other jurisdictions often renders the courts powerless to check presidential whims.
I would also not agree that just because something is considered (or found after the fact) to be constitutional that it is necessarily right or just.
To respond to your actual point... consider the sanctity of an individual's private, productive life. If soldiers are going to come through the door and put you in prison, they had better have a pretty good reason. In law, those reasons are very clearly articulated. Most Americans would claim that they consider things like due process to be exceptionally important aspects of our legal system... yet we are shockingly capable of ignoring them when the subgroup being violated is a small minority, and we succumb to the weakest arguments in favor of excesses.
Your argument could easily be used to justify any excessive use of power on the grounds that it's better than being blown up. By that logic, short of blowing up the citizenry, the president should have no checks on wartime powers (and calling something like post-911 a "war" gives rise to the question of what exactly constitutes one).
To zoom back out briefly and conclude, I think the letter of the law and legal justification is largely secondary... we can judge ourselves morally by how we acted in various situations, regardless of whether or not it was currently legal.
War, war propaganda, etc., cloud human judgment. Nobody other than a casualty ever really understands war, and so we are all doomed to reason poorly about it always. I'd argue that the pre-war aspect of much of US behavior on China (from Obama's trade war salvos to Krugman's rants) is one reason why Americans are so willing to embrace propaganda again so soon after the Iraq fiasco.
He was elected -- though yes a significant percentage went to a third candidate so it wasn't a strong mandate.
He did not end up doing Evil Things like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc -- though he did have the misfortune to become President when half the country tried to secede and therefore a civil war broke out over it, and had the misfortune of being in that situation when a rather imperfectly & ambiguously written document was the official rulebook on what he was and was not allowed to do. A document which, to this day, is still debated by thousands of so-called experts as to it's exact meaning.
Also, being a tyrant is not necessarily a bad thing. One could be a wise, benevolent tyrant. Though reality is shades of grey, I'd argue that Lincoln was _at worst_ a benevolent tyrant.
Anyway, the definition or common usage of tyrant has shifted many times. I don't think he qualifies for the one that equates to Evil Dictator.